Due to the increasing use of social networking sites for both personal and corporate communication, there is an increasing demand that individuals, companies, or their representatives make efficient use of these social networking communication channels. One of the primary uses of these networks is the dissemination of information to a broad audience. The audience includes the individuals, also on the same social networking site, who are actively reading to or otherwise consuming the messages sent by the disseminating party. The audience may also include those not actively pursuing the disseminated content, but who may be interested in it if they were to receive it. For ease of explanation, the disseminating party will hereafter be referred to as a “user” and the audience members will hereafter be referred to as “followers.”
One of the primary difficulties a user has in reaching his or her followers is determining the optimal or best time to post a message. In general, these messages are not sent to each follower, but rather are broadcast so that anyone on the social networking site may see them. Each follower may have a personal feed of messages with which he or she is presented. The feed may be a queue of messages broadcast by the people the individual is following as well as any messages directed specifically to the individual. Due to the high rate at which messages are posted to these social networking sites, an individual's feed may grow very rapidly. These messages are posted both while the individual is online at that particular site (or another site) and also while the individual is offline. In order to increase the probability of an individual seeing a message, one should post the message while the individual is online.
Existing post time suggestion systems base their suggestions on a number of erroneous assumptions. First, many assume that all individuals utilizing social networks follow similar usage patterns. While it is true there are some similarities (e.g., posting activity is the lowest in the middle of the night), there are significant differences in the overall posting patterns of different groups. The second erroneous strategy is to suggest post times based on when followers direct a post to other individuals or rebroadcast a post to their own followers. These post times are very tightly correlated with when the individual posts. Therefore, using these post times captures the posting pattern of the individual posting rather than his or her followers.
Thus, there is a long felt need in the field of social networking and the related posting for social networking for a system and methods that suggest ideal times to post messages to social networks such that the messages will have a maximum impact, as defined by the user, or the user's followers.